Explanatory Note

So, this is my first blog post. I had a blog with friends a couple of years ago, but it was disabled after a year or so of disuse. The genesis of that blog was a trip to Chicago a year after we all left grad school after we started debating arcane philosophical points on various subjects. We all looked at each other and said "I miss this". So my bright idea was to have a ready-to-go website that we could all post to. Needless to say it lasted all of a couple months (a fate I hope to avoid here!)

Ah, the title... "Explanatory Note". My blog is called "Chaos in oneself" and the website is chaosdancingstar.blogspot.com This is from a Nietzsche quotation:
"One must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star."

A couple of years ago I received a fridge magnet as a birthday present from my mom with that quotation on it. That same year I got a journal with the same quotation on it for Christmas from a friend! Although I don't believe in fate, this quotation stuck with me. More than one person in the world saw this and thought of me... so I started to wonder why. It's always interesting to think about how others see you, so this "two sigma event" struck me.

I like to think that people see my chaotic tendencies as a necessary predicate to amazing results :) What do I mean by chaotic tendencies? I don't just mean clothes piling up or deadlines being flexed... I like to think of it as the seemingly chaotic jumps my thoughts seem to take. A good friend of mine (who just published a book "The Riverbones", read it it's amazing - it's a travel memoir about his time in Suriname, and I make a cameo as the "mathematician friend") used to describe me as "thinking outside the box", and the connections that he's referring to I think stem from all of the seemingly random connections I make between seemingly disparate thoughts and ideas.

Anyway, this is a bit of background of the blog title and website name. Don't know if anyone's reading, I hope to continue to blog about subjects such as finance, politics, mathematics, economics, sailing, books, current events. With that cross-section of subjects I think I'll be lucky if anyone is reading! Oh well, it'll be cathartic and I can practice oratory.